Sign it Consulting Agreement Online

How to eSign a document: bird dog consulting agreement form

alright folks let's get this underway I'll show you in this tutorial how to write a very consultant friendly consulting agreement and what I mean by that is this will teach consultants how to write consulting agreements that will protect their interests and protect them legally and financially and I'll go through this step-by-step I learned much of this not just by reading up on consulting agreements but also by working with my attorney in the operation of my security consultancy that I run and have been running for several years quite successfully and and some trial and error so with you know with those influences in mind over several years I've come to this particular format and wording for my consulting agreement which works wonderfully well and I'll go into why that is and the elements of it right now so here we have the consulting agreement with the title at the top now granted you can vary from this format and from these clauses if you wish you can add other clauses you can subtract clauses if you wish but I think the points I make here you should be able to learn something from several of them at the very least so up top you just have the simple statement this agreement is made between a company name which is your client and with the principal place of business at this address and then you put your company name and your address if it's just a sole proprietorship where it's just you as an individual then you put your personal name here in your address so in the first clause you put the services that you'd be providing you can list those here and the second clause we have the payment clause where you specify the deposit the amount of the part of the deposit that the client will be paying you and this is this is this is crucial you do want to get a deposit from every client before starting work for them because with a new client you don't know whether they're able to pay you for the services that you're going to render and you don't know if they're inclined to pay you not all clients are honorable not all of them have money and not all of them intend to pay consultants so to weed out some of the bad eggs and deadbeats you definitely want to require a substantial deposit up front before you start providing than any service that's essential and you also can specify here how much you'd be paid per hour you can charge a flat fee for a particular project or task but if you if you're going to take that approach you better be able to define very clearly and precisely what the parameters of that service is going to be because if it cannot be clearly defined and limited then you could be getting yourself into a lot of trouble so even though I know some other consultants advise using a flat fee approach whenever possible I actually like the hourly charge for most work is that way you ensure that you get paid for all the time you put into it terms of payment you want to you want to ensure that you charge late fees for any late payments and my attorney suggested a late fee of five percent of the amount due and thereafter all outstanding balances would accrue one and a half percent late fees until per month until fully paid that's just a suggestion but absolutely do put late fees in and make them significant otherwise your clients have no financial incentive to pay you on time materials you can use this clause to specify who whether it be you or your client will provide materials for your work so that's you know up to you and your client intellectual property ownership this is important if you're going to be you know providing any documents or intellectual property of any sort and what this wording here says or another way to translate this is when it says you grant the client a royalty-free non-exclusive license to use anything you've created for them what that means is they don't have to pay you royalties when they use it and as far as non-exclusive what that means is that you're giving them license to use the materials that you create for them but that ik that license is not exclusive to them you could also be granting that license to other clients so that's what that means there that's very important wording if you choose to use that approach and as far as the license having a perpetual term that just means that it goes on you you you give them license to use the materials you create for them forever that's what's meant by perpetual term and it's also important to put in here that the client may not transfer that license to someone else and you also want to include here that you as the consultant retain all copyrights patent rights and other intellectual property rights now granted depending on the sort of consultancy or service you provide it may be more suitable to grant those copyrights and other intellectual property rights to the client but in general it's more advantageous for you to retain those rights so that's why I include that clause here and it's worked well for me a term of agreement you want to certainly include a clause to indicate when this agreement would terminate this is how I specify that either the date that I complete the services or the date that either of us indicates that we wish to terminate the agreement you also need to specify how that notice of termination would be given and you also should include in here this clause that you will be entitled to reimbursement for all work performed up to the date of termination otherwise the client may claim that they don't owe you for the work that you performed because they terminated the agreement before paying you know so you don't want that so do include this or a similar clause to ensure that you are entitled to all work that you performed independent contractor status what that addresses is whether you are an employee or an independent contractor to the client and generally speaking well not generally speaking you would be an independent contractor not the clients employee and you can use this additional wording here as well what this particular clause also addresses is that you as a consultant have the right to hire other people as subcontractors and to use other people to provide these services to the client that's important because you don't want the client claiming that you violated the agreement by having someone else provide this service to them now let's see here exclusive agreement what this addresses is that this Agreement this consulting agreement is the only agreement between you and the client this is important to note in the consulting agreement because otherwise the client could claim that you had some other agreement with them that was in conflict with this or superseded this whether it be oral or in writing so if you include this clause about this agreement being the only agreement between you and the client and then you get this signed by you in the client that way it you know it establishes very clearly and legally that the only agreement between you and the client is what's in this agreement so that that's an important protection for you there as far as the notices clause this basically just specifies the addresses and email addresses for you and your client where you would send notices that are required under this agreement also it's a good idea to indicate that this Agreement does not establish a partnership between you and your client and that neither the client nor you have the authority to enter into contracts on the other's behalf that's very important um no resolving disputes this clause he requires some discussion because in a lot of consulting agreement templates that I've seen particularly in books they often have rather generic wording here to the effect of if there's a dispute regarding this agreement then that dispute shall be brought to the appropriate court of law for resolution but fortunately I have a very smart honorable lawyer who when he took a look at that wording that I had brought to him for the consulting agreement he said no no no no that's that's not a good idea that's in the attorneys best interest not in your best interest because if in this clause in your consulting agreement you specified that disputes are to be handled in court then what that does is it removes the possibility of resolving disputes more easily and cost-effectively for you and instead makes all disputes very expensive for you because you then have to go to court to resolve any disputes and most likely pain attorney for them to represent you in court so it gets very expensive and that's more than the attorneys interest than it is in yours so what my attorney advised me was to change this wording and instead put in here that disputes regarding this agreement are to be handled by mediation which is a much less expensive we resolve contract disputes which uses a you know an objective unbiased third party to mediate disputes and then if the dispute cannot be mediated within a certain period of time then the the then the dispute would be handled by arbitration which is legally binding and again that's still far less expensive than the lawsuits to resolve disputes so this again protects your interests rather than getting attorneys unnecessarily involved and all those expenses also you want to put in here that each party sends their own cost of mediation or arbitration so that your client doesn't attempt to hold you responsible for paying for their attorneys or other legal services and also you can then put in here this sentence or something to this fact that you know if you attempt to resolve disputes using mediation arbitration and the other party doesn't comply then you can bring the matter to the appropriate court that's also important to include in here because you know if you're if you do have to address some dispute with your client and they're unresponsive and don't engage in mediation or arbitration with you then you do need to have the right to bring it to court so that's why you you have this sentence in there and what you also want to do is when you're specifying the court venue specify that your state's your home estates laws are the the laws that pertain to this agreement and disputes regarding this agreement so if say you're in Massachusetts then you specify that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts laws govern this agreement and disputes regarding that way you're not having to go out of state to you know to to handle the matter in court it's also easier for you to get an attorney within your state who can handle the matter so that this the sentence or something that effect is also very important to protect your interests also now liability to the client this is very important you can use this wording if you want my attorney help me come up with this and this basically protects you from the client claiming that you owe them because of you know some mistake you made you know basically I it essentially says that you're only liable to them if you make a willful and deliberate mistake or engage and knowing misconduct but protects you from other sorts of accidental or unknowing mistakes as well as events that are beyond your control so that's very important to address in the agreement and then at the end you just have the signatures section where you have the clients company name here and then you want the word by an a signature line and the company executives name underneath that they sign here and you want the title here whether it be President or chief executive officer or what have you and the date that they sign it and then in the consultant field you put your company name and then you put a bye line underneath that for your signature that's very important because when you use the bind line what that indicates is that when you're personally signing this you're signing it on behalf of your company or corporation so you personally are not engaging in this consulting agreement or contract with your client your company's engaging in this contract and so if you have a corporation or a limited liability company or something like that that's a separate legal entity from you personally you really need to sign it this way so up so as to indicate that it's your company engaging in this contract with the client not you personally so even though you sign this personally you need to use this byline and state your company name above it to protect yourself legally and then put your job title there and the date of your signature there and they have it so I hope that we covered some points that are of insight or benefit to you understand that this is not meant as legal advice I'm not an attorney and I don't know your situation or needs so it's really up to you to address your own situation properly this was just meant to be informational and I hope it was of some benefit to you